1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of peer-to-peer and brokered communication services and, more particularly, to a system and method for permitting an initiator and a recipient to quickly negotiate the beginning of a communication session based on the initiator's expressed current need and the current availability of the recipient.
2. Description of the Related Art
When establishing traditional communication sessions, e.g. a traditional phone call, where the recipient of a phone call can use at most the phone number of the initiator as the basis for deciding whether to accept the phone call or not, there is no way for the recipient to judge the intent of the phone call, such as the urgency or the type of conversation the initiator wants to engage in, the alternative availabilities of the initiator if the recipient would like to talk to the initiator at a later time, or even the best mode of communication for the intended type of conversation. In the absence of all this information, the recipient can only decide whether to accept or decline to accept the phone call. If the user accepts the call, then the user can learn the session context as part of the phone call. If the recipient, after having accepted the call, learns that he or she would rather not continue the phone call, for reasons of etiquette, it may be difficult to immediately end the phone call. A rapid negotiation prior to call setup would save both the recipient and the initiator time and effort, and increase the productivity and convenience of both entities.
Existing product technologies permit users to associate specific phone numbers with different ring-tones to map incoming calls from known telephone numbers to different ring-tones. As a result, recipients of phone calls from known telephone numbers are permitted to determine the identification of a caller based solely on the sound of the ring-tone. However, associating ring-tones with phone numbers neither permits the recipient of a phone call to gauge the importance and urgency of an incoming phone call nor does it permit the recipient of a phone call to negotiate a later, more appropriate time and/or method to communicate with the caller. That is, the phone call must be either immediately accepted or rejected.
Montage is a system developed by Sun Microsystems that comprises a human session initiation protocol, i.e. it permits a person to visually and remotely check whether another person is present at a particular location, such as an office, and whether that person is more than likely available for communication via so-called “glances” at a person being viewed over a web enabled camera. Montage permits the initiating party to then request from the other person the setup of a communication session (either text, voice or video-based), and the recipient of the request can indicate, in various ways, whether he is available for communication with the initiator of the communication session. Montage moves the communication setup protocol between an initiator and a recipient to a virtual space. The setup protocol is entirely based on human interaction, but it is not an automated process. As a result, both the initiator of the communication and the recipient thereof must be humans, which requires a considerable level of manual effort on the part of the initiator and the recipient. More importantly, the initiator and the recipient cannot be software-based user agents.
The sender of an email is permitted to specify a priority level that is displayed to the person receiving the email having the specified priority level. Setting priorities for emails, however, does not translate into a visual, tactile or acoustic signal that the email recipient can perceive and interpret without actually looking at the email header. As a result, the email recipient is already forced to at least partially consider the email before being able to determine its importance and urgency. In addition, the complete email must be sent to the recipient before the recipient can interpret the priority of the email. Clearly, the email priority level and willingness of the intended recipient to accept it are not negotiated before the email is sent to the recipient.
In traditional telephony, the recipient of a phone call hears a ring-tone or a visual/tactile equivalent thereof, and can then decide whether to accept the call based on the ring-tone itself and possibly information about the initiator's identity. An intelligent ring-tone service modulates the ring-tone or the visual/tactile equivalent to allow the recipient to infer the urgency and importance of the call, as well as possibly infer other information. Based on this information, the recipient can make a better decision than would be possible with plain ring-tones as to how available he is to accept the communication request. However, this conventional technique does not permit the recipient to enter into a negotiation with the initiator prior to establishment of the communication session. For example, a phone call recipient must pick up the phone to tell the caller that she is currently unavailable for the type of communication that the caller has in mind and that the caller may want to call again at a later time. This is time-consuming because human social contracts often prohibit expedited negotiations and because technical problems, such as cell phone reception, might slow down such negotiations. A traditional negotiation may be particularly unwelcome to the recipient if the initiator only intends to engage in a social chat or wants to ask an incidental question at a time that the recipient is currently occupied with an important task.
Celine Pering, “Taming of the Ring: Context Specific Social Communication Devices” Short Talk: Communication Media, CHI: Changing the World, Changing Ourselves, CHI 2002, Minneapolis, Minn., USA discloses an interactive system and method for discretely handling phone communications in delicate situations. As disclosed therein caller-ID is used to provide enough information about the identity of the caller for the receiver to decide whether to answer the call. However, caller-ID does not provide a clear way to determine whether the caller wishes to engage in meaningless banter with the recipient or whether the caller has a more urgent issue that the recipient may wish to address.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a system and method for permitting an initiator and a recipient to quickly negotiate the beginning of a communication session, such as a phone call, based on the expressed current need of an initiator and the current availability of a recipient to participate in the communication session.